What a wonderful evocative word that is, freedom.So many times it has been used without any recall to the consequences ones freedom has upon another's freedom.
How could one disagree with that word and call yourself an American?Well i expect a few thousand native Americans and the descendants of slaves might just question that long held revered notion.This magic word was being banded around when black men where enslaved and native americans where still loosing their land.
One mans freedom to extort, manipulate,rob,exploit is another mans chains.Freedom has rules and to use the word as if it lifts your opinion above others is political propaganda of the lowest kind.
As I said, a libertarian system allows for maximum freedom, not anarchy, because anarchy is not stable. Yes, if everyone could coexist without the use of force to achieve their objective, anarchy would enable maximum freedom; but anarchy always evolves into a new order, usually some violence based feudal or clannish system, which obviously allows for alot less freedom than libertarianism. Also, freedom and equality are mutually exclusive, unless everyone just happens to be equal from birth, which onviously does not ever happen. In other words, for everyone to be equal, force has to be used against the more wealthy or more able or otherwise 'better' people in order to either lower them outright, or appropriate their resources to hand to the 'lesser' people (I'm not using those words in a derogotory sense, I mean better and lesser in terms of merit, ability, which social group that happened to be born into, etc.). That is by definition a loss of freedom for the 'better' people, and generally leads to a loss of freedom in practice for the others as well, in that welfare of any sort tends to lead to dependence, not prosperity.
What a wonderful evocative word that is, freedom.So many times it has been used without any recall to the consequences ones freedom has upon another's freedom.
How could one disagree with that word and call yourself an American?Well i expect a few thousand native Americans and the descendants of slaves might just question that long held revered notion.This magic word was being banded around when black men where enslaved and native americans where still loosing their land.
One mans freedom to extort, manipulate,rob,exploit is another mans chains.Freedom has rules and to use the word as if it lifts your opinion above others is political propaganda of the lowest kind.
That's exactly my point. If one man's freedom equals another man's inequity or suffering, even if indirect, how can we consider that to be a universal good?
That's exactly my point. If one man's freedom equals another man's inequity or suffering, even if indirect, how can we consider that to be a universal good?
You toss around these vapid platitudes (seriously, which one of us supports the freedom to harm others, free market ethics are built upon non-aggression) without ever providing justification for your claims.
I know what you think, you have repeated that ad nauseum, for me to care about that, I need to know why you think it.
Could not have said it better.
You toss around these vapid platitudes (seriously, which one of us supports the freedom to harm others, free market ethics are built upon non-aggression) without ever providing justification for your claims.
I know what you think, you have repeated that ad nauseum, for me to care about that, I need to know why you think it.
Does a historic injustice somehow make freedom a silly idea? I don't have slaves, neither did any of my ancestors.
How am I responsible for others creating inequity or suffering? I can still advocate freedom.
Well if you don't consider anything I said to be justification for why I consider capitalism to be intrinsically immoral then you haven't been paying attention. I'm not talking about aggression in the free market. I'm talking about inequality and unfairness in the free market. That statement demonstrates that you don't get my point at all. You don't have to agree with me, but at least try to understand me.
---------- Post added at 03:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 03:43 PM ----------
I'm confused. Where do you stand on this subject?
I don't know what that has to do with my point about one man's freedom equaling another man's inequities. I was referring to the capitalist system's dependency on economic class structures & economic inequality, and its causing of poverty and unemployment.
There are supposed to be no classes in a free market system, that means the system has been corrupted, so you can't blame capitalism for it.
You can't really say "humans have been collectivist throughout it's history, so taking freedoms is ok."
Pretty much all your freedoms and privileges are another mans inequities. What's the alternative?
By wanting transportation, food or all the other modern commodities, you know are responsible for others inequities. You know that it is inevitable. The desire for transportation is nothing else than, to put it frankly, the desire for the oppression of a large part of the world population.
Maybe this clears it up, I wrote it before I saw this response of yours:
I agree, this is the same for using oil products. Which is your entire lifestyle.
In order to understand why oil is so important to our economy and our daily lives, we have to understand something about what it does for us. We value any source of energy because we can harness it to do work for us. For example, every time you turn on a 100-watt light bulb, it is the same as if you had a fit human being in the basement, pedaling as hard as they could to keep that bulb lit. That is how much energy a single light bulb uses. In the background, while you run water, take hot showers, and vacuum the floor, it is as if your house is employing the services of 50 such extremely fit bike riders. This "slave count," if you will, exceeds that of kings in times past. It can truly be said that we are all living like kings. Although we may not appreciate that, because it all seems so ordinary that we take it for granted.
And how much 'work' is embodied in a gallon of gasoline, our most favorite substance of them all? Well, if you put a single gallon in a car, drove it until it ran out, and then turned around and pushed the car home, you'd find out. It turns out that a gallon of gas has the equivalent energy of 500 hours of hard human labor, or 12-1/2 forty-hour work weeks.
So how much is a gallon of gas worth? $4? $10? If you wanted to pay this poor man $15 an hour to push your car home, then we might value a gallon of gas at $7,500.
Here's another example. It has been calculated that the amount of food that average North America citizen consumes in year requires the equivalent of 400 gallons of petroleum to produce and ship.
At $4/gallon, that works out to $1600 of your yearly food bill spent on fuel, which doesn't sound too extreme. However, when we consider that those 400 gallons represent the energy equivalent of 100 humans working year round at 40 hours a week, then it takes on an entirely different meaning. This puts your diet well out of the reach of most kings of times past.
When we first came to this country, we were finding some pretty spectacular things just lying around, like this copper nugget. Soon those were all gone, and then we were onto smaller nuggets, and then onto copper ores that had the highest concentrations. Now?
Now we have things like the Bingham canyon mine in Utah. It is two and a half miles across and three-fourths of a mile deep, and it started out as a mountain. It sports a final ore concentration of 0.2%. Do you think we'd have gone to this effort if there were still massive copper nuggets lying around in stream beds? No way.
Let's take a closer look. See that truckway down there? It's fueled by petroleum; diesel, specifically. If we couldn't spare the fuel to run that truck, what do you suppose we'd carry the ore out with? Donkeys? These trucks carry 255 tons/ per load. Suppose a donkey could carry 150 lbs. This means this truck carries the same in a single load as 3,400 donkeys. That's quite a lot of donkeys.
Copper. What is the computer you are typing on right now made of? The wiring in the walls to bring you electricity, the wiring of the factory that produced the clothes you have on?
All you eat, have, are, can and do depends on oil. If oil were distributed equally on earth, you could not drive a car, you could not have the leisure time to post this and you would have a very limited diet. Supporting immorality is a necessary component for almost everything you do. It is a 100% certainty that without harm to others, you could not have it.
And since roughly 80% of the world population are excluded from having those "oil slaves", you are in a way stealing their slaves, or someone else is to sell the slaves to you.
You can only have the life you have, because someone or something (a political system etc.) is restricting others from having it. So you have to support immorality for everything you do. Eating a sandwich is immoral, driving your kids to soccer practice is immoral, studying is immoral, and spending leisure time debating ethics on your computer is the height of immoral behavior. I don't even want to get into the moral implications of producing that computer.
So unless you are going to live like diogenes of sinope, you're bound to be a hypocrite.
Everything you've just stated amounts to the reason why I believe we should discard the monetary system for a resource based economic system that equally distributes goods and services. From what you've just stated, you seem to have an apathetic and egoistic attitude towards economic inequality and poverty. Your answer is to embrace the intrinsic immorality of the system if it makes your life better.
I have a question for you . . . do you consider fairness to be right or wrong?
What I stated is not what is wrong with a free market, but what's wrong with government control. You are endorsing government control. How come?
Sorry if I seem smug, that's not my intention. I didn't read a lot of this thread.
A resource based economic system? What is that? If it is some sort of techno-leninism? I'm telling you that it wont work. It's only an excuse that is pretty popular in the internet these days for you to give up your freedoms. Some people need to hear that the planet is warming to sign away their freedoms, others need to hear that we could create some sort of techno equality utopia. Both are just pretty stories. And a thinking being will not believe something to be true because he wishes it to be true.
People won't stop being selfish jerks because they can have all the stuff they want. Scarcity could not be ended, and if it could, humanity would not suddenly be nice. Greed, bigotry and taking advantage of each others is not natural, fine. But the causes of those are not mediate need. Humanity become the dominant beast on the planet because it was the most efficient at surviving in a scarcity world. That will not change in a post-scarcity utopia. Even if it were possible.
I consider fairness to be right, of course. But the word doesn't mean anything any more. It is used as a wildcard excuse for unfairness and taking freedoms. Whenever I hear "fairness", I run the other way.
You got to differentiate between equality of opportunity (fairness) and equality of outcome (a stupid idea). "Fairness" just binds those two together, with a different meaning depending on situation.
"You don't like fairness (=equality of opportunity), so you must agree to more fairness (equality of outcome)".
Some people, like Ayn Rand's moral objectivists :sarcastic:, say that free-market laissez-faire capitalism is moral because it fosters economic freedom and individualism or self-reliance. I believe that this negates two things. One is that freedom is not always synonymous with goodness and it's not always equal for everyone. Economic freedom seems to only benefit those who are fortunate enough to have the odds in their favor. People are born into economic classes and have no choice over what economic class they inherit. You also have issues such as employment and discrimination, which can affect whether or not a person can achieve the economic level of their choosing. The capitalist system is dependent upon economic inequality. Capitalism cannot survive without an economic class system that keeps certain people at a lower level than others. Therefore, capitalism can never be synonymous with equality, fairness, and impartiality.
Individualism or self-reliance ignores the fact that human beings are social animals, dependent upon each other for our long term survival. The scientific facts are on the side of collectivism, not individualism.
"Some problems said to be associated with capitalism include: unfair and inefficient distribution of wealth and power; a tendency toward market monopoly or oligopoly (and government by oligarchy); imperialism and various forms of economic and cultural exploitation; and phenomena such as social alienation, inequality, unemployment, and economic instability. Critics have maintained that there is an inherent tendency towards oligolopolistic structures when laissez-faire is combined with capitalist private property. Because of this tendency either laissez-faire, or private property, or both, have drawn fire from critics who believe an essential aspect of economic freedom is the extension of the freedom to have meaningful decision-making control over productive resources to everyone. Economist Branko Horvat asserts, "it is now well known that capitalist development leads to the concentration of capital, employment and power. It is somewhat less known that it leads to the almost complete destruction of economic freedom."[123] SMU Economics Professor and New York Times #1 best-selling author, Ravi Batra, has long maintained that excessive income and wealth inequalities are a fundamental cause of financial crisis and economic depression in the capitalist economy." - Capitalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I therefore conclude that capitalism is immoral.
I couldn't agree more except i think capitalism is partially immoral just has socialism. Like i said in a different post about capitalism, capitalism is a riskier system in which people can success and prosper and then people can also go on a downward spiral and likely go nowhere in their lives. Socialism is a much safer system in which there isn't as much freedom but the quality of life will be just above avergae, and just that for most people. There won't be as much rich and there won't be as much poor. To me the two econmic system seem to equal out and both will end up being partially immoral.
Please don't give me any of those conspiracy theories about global warming being a way to take our freedoms away because there are evil politicians sitting being their desks plotting to take over the world. Let's just leave that alone.
I am not endorsing government control over people. My theory is based on less government control over people. In fact, my idea for a resource based economy is not the same as the governing system we have today. I believe we should abolish the political system and replace it with a communal based system that's based on scientific solutions to our problems. Its community based control over means of production and the equal distribution of goods and services.
I don't believe in a "perfect" society, especially when you consider the fact that people have their own ideas of perfection. I don't think everyone will be happy all of the time and there would be no problems. I just know that it would be a much better societal system than the one we have now.
You have an overly-cynical view of human nature. If human nature can be defined as anything, it should be defined as behavior that is shaped and molded by environment and experience. It is the environment that creates many of the behaviors that we find objectionable.
I'm not really speaking of post-scarcity in the sense that resources will no longer be scarce. The idea of a resource based economy is to manage the scarcity in a more effective way.
You say that capitalism is based on equal opportunity, but I disagree. How can opportunity be equal if not everyone has equal access to capital and employment?
If you consider fairness to be a right then you must consider unfairness to be a wrong.
If the capitalist system is based on unfair conditions, doesn't that make it morally wrong?
I mean besides the fact that the monetary system itself induces corruption and immorality.
So how can we justify dragging down the productive to create equality?
Some wealthier people are productive but in my opinion more lucky (Inheritance, background, and just pure luck that seems to favor people that are better off). Some less fortunate people are more productive than richer people, it's jus that can't get out of their inherited social caste, even though a social group isn't set in stone like in other countries, its clear enough to restrict many people.
